Australian scholars of Sydney University found that one of the breeds of African honey bees is capable of producing almost identical clones of working females. This allows insects to avoid the harmful effects of virgin reproduction. The opening is reported in the article published in the Journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B: BioLogical Sciences.
The ability to clone themselves is obvious advantages, since there is no need to look for a sexual partner, and in the offspring there is no genetic dilution, that is, the initial genome is maintained from generation to generation. Some insect populations have developed a fueling partner when females are able to reproduce without fertilizing new females. The phenomenon is found in some haplodiploid insects, in which males develop from non-advocated eggs and are haploid, that is, have one set of chromosomes, and diploid females appear with a double chromosome dialing – from fertilized eggs.
When haplodiploidia, usually only the uterus is capable of carrying eggs from which women’s individuals appear. Operating bees, which are also females, in rare cases (for example, in the event of the death of the uterus), only non-advocated eggs can be carried, of which the males always come out. However, at the Cape Medical Bee Apis Mellifera Capensis, due to the only mutation, working females can give diploid offspring, that is, new working females, without resorting to fertilization.
Tankomic parthenogenesis sometimes leads to a loss of heterozygousness (when various variants of the same gene are in different copies of the same chromosome) due to genetic recombination, leading to a new combination of genes. Heterozygency on certain genes is important for determining the floor at bees. At Apis Mellifera Capensis, workers multiply only flush, and the uterus always mate and multiply in sexual path. However, this means that working females had to reduce the frequency of recombination in order not to produce homozygous offspring.
Scientists conducted an experiment, during which the reproductive organs of the uterus were glued with a tape that does not give it to mate with the males, so it passed to the parthenogenetic method of reproduction. The results of full-hydrogen sequencing DNA insects and microsatellite genotyping showed that the progeny of the uterus occurred about a hundred times more recombinations than the offspring of workers’ bees. In addition, new working bees turned out to be almost identical clones of their parents. In other words, a certain mechanism for blocking recombination was present only in working females, but not in the uterus.
researchers also found that one of the lines of working bees in the ule successfully cloned itself for about 30 years, and this serves as a clear sign that workers’ females in caps of bees do not suffer from congenital defects or infertility.